A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination

by Thierry de Duve
1908-1918, New Haven: Yale, 1994.
Reviewed by Michael Dashkin

A Passion for Wings is a 320-page, profusely illustrated book, part one of a projected three-part series which the author terms a "history of a complex of emotions" which greeted the invention and earliest flights of heavier than air crafts during the ten years between 1908-1918, the immediate years after the Wright brothers first flights until the end of the First World War. The author, Professor Robert Wohl, teaches in the Department of History at UCLA.

Professor Wohl's work is a contribution to a suprisingly small field, albeit one which has grown steadily in recent years: Such work attempts to assess the impact of technological advance upon the social and political life of the modern period, and to chart the marks such advance has left on the artistic and literary production of the period.

The book consists of eight chapters, each of which explores a carefully-chosen event, artist, art movement, literary figure or body of writing inspired by the state of aviation at a given moment. Chapter One, for example, describes the Wright brothers' pioneering efforts, with an emphasis on their exhibition flights in France and the imapct these flights had on the French public, other aviators, artists, writers and journalists. The figure of the spectator -- whether present at an airshow such as those the Wrights participated in; or as combat reconaissance photographer; or as reader immersed in science-fiction novel -- appears throughout these pages. This is a visual history not only in the narrow sense that it draws on visual evidence in the form of painting or photograph. It is about the spectacle of the airplane viewed from the ground below and of the earth as seen from the aircraft above.

Succeeding chapters chart advances in the state of aviation fueled by patriotism, the hope of fame or money, or the requirements of millitaries. Aviation presents itself also as aesthetic solution for artists and writers as diverse as H.G. Wells, Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, Pablo Picasso, American novelist Sinclair Lewis.

Historical events, technological breakthroughs and art movements are treated in a careful, thorough, detailed manner. the reader gains a sense especially of the way writers, artists and spectators alike seized upon the image of aircraft inflight as a kind of invigorating tonic for social fears concerning national lethergy or aesthetic exhaustion (the emphais throughout is Western Europe, although a section does treat Russian artists).

Although Wohl concentrates on literay and visual material from the high culture of the period, his book includes numerous examples of visual material drawn from the mass culture -- notably postcards, photojournalism and posters. These mass culture images are especially resonant of the new social forms (of leisure, spectator sport, work organized around machine rhythms) emerging during this period. In this, these images differ from much of the high culture works discussed, which tend to appear synthetic in their treatment. Further exploration might seek to draw out these differences, to read these high culture images against mass culture artifacts. Especially interesting might be efforts to understand the exuberance and the richly-embroidered fantasy of these postcards and posters -- one of which depicts an aviator scattering flowers over a Springtime stretch of Southern French coastline. How precisely did this technology become linked with such fantasies? Were these utopian images displaced by darker images born out of wartime experience and civil air crashes or have the two existed as counterpoints throughout the life of aviation?

What emerges (tangentially and insistently) from Wohl's study is the origin of a world we now consider familiar, so familiar, in fact, that we accept as routine the developments celebrated or feared here. Evident is the birth of a set of familiar figures and paradigms, some of them far removed from aviation proper but brought about in part through aviation's accomplishments. Among these are: The modern athelete in competition against the clock; the celebrity feted in mass journalism and mass publishing; the mass spectacle broadcast in print, radio, film, television; the development of trendspotting and future-forecasting in journalism, popular literature, and among media-generated experts; the origin of a new way of seeing facilitated by flight; the notion that cinema and aviation have a natural affinity for each other.

There are a number of methodological issues raised here which should be addressed by future researchers. Among them: Why has aviation history been, as Wohl terms it, "a walled-off compartment that most historians ( have) felt no need to visit"? What methodology is appropriate to a cultural history of technology? If such a methodology relies heavily on images as primary source matter, as does Wohl's work, how will it differ or remain consistent with the methods of art history?

A Passion for Wings should be considered not as a contribution to a narrow field (aviation history) within an only slightly broader one ( history of technology). Rather it should be considered as a contribution to the history of modernity, an era which, as it recedes into the past, reveals to us more and more of its complexity.